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The Top Seven: Real Time Rehab

Jeremy Green knows firsthand the exercises prescribed by doctors following a surgery can be difficult to perform without the assistance of a professional.Following surgeries on his rotator cuff, his physical therapist handed him a piece of paper with a list of exercises that, if performed at home, would aid him in a speedy recovery. But even as a personal trainer, Green was confused by what he read.As a physical therapy student at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Green was asked, “How can we improve physical therapy?” Rather than daydream about improving the industry, Green founded a business with that goal in mind.Real Time Rehab, founded in 2006, is a DVD-based physical therapy program.“Physical therapy has been using paper home exercise programs for the last 30 years,” Green said. “(Real Time Rehab) allows any health care provider that prescribes a home exercise program for a patient to have full-motion, live-action scenes on a DVD.”With the help of his brother-in-law, who owns Martini Shot Productions, Green was able to shoot demonstrations of 99 percent of the exercises commonly prescribed by physical therapists.“Each individual exercise is added to as many phases of the rehabilitation process that the health care provider would like,” Green explained. “When done adding the exercises to the phases for the patient, (the health care provider) then burns the rehabilitation protocol onto a DVD. The patient then has a customized rehabilitation protocol for their use at home through their DVD player.”Since his business’s inception, Green has worked with Rogers State University’s Innovation Center, keeping an office there, and i2E on RTR’s development.He applied for the 2009 Spirit Award because he thought it would be a good opportunity for exposure. His company has now received that exposure, but it’s also received much more.“What’s helped us through the awards process is the coaches,” Green said. “They’ve put us in contact with a lot of important people and helped broaden our horizons.”Originally, the product was intended to benefit the PT patient, but Green said the Spirit Award coaches helped him understand how it could also benefit physicians and military personnel.Physicians can benefit from the time saved by RTR, he said.“With our DVD, the doctor can run through the exercises very quickly, hand you this program and say, ‘I need you doing these exercises. Come back and see me in three weeks.’”“(The Spirit Award coaches) inspired us to do some different things that were a little bit outside our scope that will be very profitable for us,” Green said.If RTR wins the Spirit Award’s $30,000 grand prize, Green said he’d put the money toward hiring salespeople who can get his product into the hands of physical therapy clinics nationwide.Green offered some advice to future Spirit Award participants: “The business plan is so underrated,” he said. “It’s not because it has to be on paper, but it’s because you need to be able to account for and have a plan. The thought that goes behind the business plan is really the most important part.”